Last Call For Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

The federal indictment against Trump on the documents case was unsealed today and it's a doozy:

 

A 37-count criminal indictment against Donald Trump was unsealed Friday, revealing allegations that the former president willfully retained hundreds of classified government records and conspired to prevent their return to U.S. officials.

The charging document, which alleges Trump kept records containing national defense information at his Florida home after leaving the White House, was made public a day after a grand jury in U.S. District Court in Miami voted to indict him.

Among other allegations, the indictment says that Trump showed classified documents to other people in the summer of 2021, after leaving office in January of that year.

Follow our live coverage of Donald Trump’s indictment in the classified documents case.

One of those documents was a “plan of attack” that he told a publisher and writer at his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club was prepared by the Pentagon.

“As president I could have declassified it,” Trump told them, according to an audio recording of that July 2021 comment which is quoted in the indictment.

“Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret,” he added.

A month or so later at Bedminster, Trump showed a representative of a political action committed “a classified map related to a military operation” and told the other man “he should not be showing it to the representative and that the representative should not get to close,” the indictment alleges.

Also charged in the indictment was Trump’s valet, Walter Nauta, who faces several of the same charges as his boss, with whom he allegedly conspired to keep classified records and hide them from a federal grand jury.

The indictment said that Trump was personally involved in packing up boxes of documents as he prepared to vacate the White House to his home at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida.

The FBI’s raid of Mar-a-Lago last August discovered hundreds of classified documents, which Trump had failed to turn over to U.S. officials after they spent a year or so trying to recover them.

 

Some 31 of the 37 charges are under the Espionage Act.  Trump is going to prison if our system holds.

The time to try to break that system, his supporters will figure, is now.

In what is becoming a now all-too-familiar trend, former President Donald Trump’s far-right supporters have threatened civil war after news broke Thursday that the former president was indicted for allegedly taking classified documents from the White House without permission.

“We need to start killing these traitorous fuckstains,” wrote one Trump supporter on The Donald, a rabidly pro-Trump message board that played a key role in planning the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Another user added: “It's not gonna stop until bodies start stacking up. We are not civilly represented anymore and they'll come for us next. Some of us, they already have.”


Trump has been indicted on seven counts following an investigation by special counsel Jack Smith into classified documents taken by Trump from the White House in 2021. The indictments have not been released, but Trump’s attorney Jim Trusty told CNN that his client is facing a charge under the Espionage Act, as well as “charges of obstruction of justice, destruction or falsification of records, conspiracy and false statements.”

Trump announced the news himself on Truth Social, writing that he had been indicted in the “Boxes Hoax” case, as he put it, and said he would be arraigned on Tuesday at Florida Southern District Courthouse in Miami. Within minutes, his supporters lit up social media platforms with violent threats and calls for civil war, according to research from VICE News and Advance Democracy, a nonpartisan think tank that tracks online extremism.

Trump supporters are making specific threats too. In one post on The Donald titled, “A little bit about Merrick Garland, his wife, his daughters,” a user shared a link to an article about the attorney general’s children.

Under the post, another user replied: “His children are fair game as far as I’m concerned.”

In a post about the special counsel conducting the probe, one user on The Donald wrote: “Jack Smith should be arrested the minute he steps foot in the red state of Florida.”


In addition to threats of violence against lawmakers and politicians, many were also calling for a civil war.

“Perhaps it’s time for that Civil War that the damn DemoKKKrats have been trying to start for years now,” a member of The Donald wrote. Another, referencing former President Barack Obama and former secretary of State Hillary Clinton, said: “FACT: OUR FOREFATHERS WOULD HAVE HUNG THESE TWO FOR TREASON…”

Others on similar social media platforms made general calls for an armed uprising. “The entire Republican Party should flood the courthouse and demand real justice here,” one supporter wrote on Truth Social. It wasn’t just anonymous users saying this, however: Right-wing talk show host Charlie Kirk called on all Trump supporters to descend on Miami on Tuesday to protest the indictment.

“This is the JFK assassinaton all over again,” right-wing personality and Pizzagate promoter Michael Cernovich wrote, claiming that the “deep state” had killed JFK and were now using the Justice Department to take down Trump.

 

The calls for terrorism against the US government are not stochastic or implied anymore.

 

They are overt and direct.

 

Most likely, they will be answered. Trump himself, at whatever event he's at next, will make that clear.

 

Here there be dragons, folks.

The Final Days Of The Blue Bird

Even with new CEO Linda Yaccarino slated to start at the end of the month, Twitter might not even make it that far as owner/manager Elon Musk threw another tantrum over allowing right-wing hate speech yesterday, causing the resignation of several top executives in protest.

Twitter’s head of trust and safety, Ella Irwin, told Reuters on Thursday that she has resigned from the social media company, which has faced criticism for lax protections against harmful content since billionaire Elon Musk acquired it in October.

Irwin, who joined Twitter in June 2022, took over as head of the trust and safety team in November when previous head Yoel Roth resigned. She oversaw content moderation.

An email to Twitter returned an automated reply with a poop emoji. Irwin declined further comment and Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Irwin’s departure comes as the platform has struggled to retain advertisers, with brands wary of appearing next to unsuitable content. 

 

The final straw for Irwin was Twitter's content arrangement with right-wing noise machine Daily Wire.

 

Twitter staff had decided that a video titled "What is a Woman?" by the Daily Wire's Matt Walsh, a far-right personality who often attacks transgender people, violated the platform's hate-speech rules.

Twitter had recently announced a content deal with the Daily Wire.

When Daily Wire's Jeremy Boreing tweeted a complaint about the decision, saying that the video was barred because it included instances of misgendering, Musk replied: "This was a mistake by many people at Twitter."

 

Irwin resigned just hours after Musk's response.

And yes, Elon wanted to post, in full, on Twitter, Matt Walsh's hour-plus transphobic and homophobic diatribe attacking June as Pride Month. For free. This on top of Musk freely admitting that he would allow misgendering of folks on Twitter and not enforce any punishment for doing so.

Tales of the Shattered Rainbow, Con't

As Pride Month in 2023 continues, the relentless radicalization of men 18-40 by the right has significantly shifted the opinions of America on trans and non-binary folks, with more acceptance of the LBG but definitely not the QT+ from even two years ago.

 

In the past several years, views have shifted on gender identities. In 2021, nearly six in ten Americans (59%) said there are only two gender identities, man and woman, and 40% of Americans believed there are many gender identities. The following year, in 2022, 62% of Americans believed that there are only two gender identities, and more than one-third (35%) said there are many gender identities. This divide slightly increased again in 2023, with 65% saying there are two gender identities and 34% saying there are many.

The discourse on the gender binary is highly polarized along partisan lines. Around nine in ten Republicans believe there are only two genders (87% in 2021, 90% in 2023). Democrats, by contrast, are less likely to believe that there are only two genders (38% in 2021, 44% in 2023). Independents have become more likely in the past few years to say that there are only two genders (60% in 2021, 66% in 2023).

Beliefs in a gender binary increased or remained steady from 2021 to 2023 among all religious groups. In 2021, 86% of white evangelical Protestants said there are only two genders, compared with 92% in 2023. In both years, around eight in ten Hispanic Protestants and Latter-day Saints said there are only two genders (79% and 81%, respectively, in 2021, and 82% and 81% in 2023). More than seven in ten Black Protestants (73% in 2021 and 71% in 2023) and around two-thirds of white mainline/non-evangelical Protestants (65% in 2021 and 67% in 2023) say there are only two genders. White Catholics have gone from more than six in ten in 2021 (62%) to nearly seven in ten in 2023 (69%) believing there are only two genders. Other Protestants of color and Hispanic Catholics have had the most drastic changes on this question among the religious groups. In 2021, 52% of other Protestants of color believed there are only two genders, compared with 73% in 2023. Hispanic Catholics went from 48% to 66%.

Like Hispanic Catholics, followers of other non-christian religions went from a minority saying there are only two genders in 2021 (42%) to the majority having that belief in 2023 (55%). Jewish Americans have remained consistent, at 44%, on this question. Religiously unaffiliated Americans who believe in only two genders have increased but remain in the minority, going from 38% in 2021 to 46% in 2023.

Younger generations are significantly less likely to believe that there are only two genders, but belief in a gender binary has increased among both Generation Z and millennials over the past several years. In 2021, Generation Z (43%) and millennials (51%) were more closely aligned with each other on this question than they were with Generation X (65%), baby boomers (62%), and the Silent Generation (68%).

In 2023, Generation Z saw a jump in the belief that there are only two genders (rising to 57%, from 43% in 2021). In 2023, members of Generation Z (57%) and millennials (60%) still hold closer beliefs to each other on this question than they do to Generation X (71%), baby boomers (68%), and the Silent Generation (69%).

There is a significant gender difference in views on the gender binary in every generation except for millennials, with men being more likely than women to believe there is a gender binary (64% of men vs. 50% of women in Generation Z, 61% vs. 59% among millennials, 75% vs. 67% among Generation X, 73% vs. 65% among baby boomers, and 76% vs. 62% among the Silent Generation).

 

In other words, using trans and non-binary folk as demonic enemies to be destroyed in order to "protect" women and children has worked astonishingly well. In more than a dozen states, in particular Florida and Texas, trans folk are being deliberately targeted for violence, but it's happening across the country.

A brawl broke out Tuesday as hundreds of protesters supporting and opposing LGBTQ rights gathered outside a Southern California school district headquarters where board members were deciding whether to recognize June as Pride Month.

At least three people were arrested outside the Glendale Unified School District’s headquarters as school board administrators discussed whether the district should declare support for Pride Month, the Glendale, Calif., Police Department said in a news release. The school board unanimously voted to recognize Pride Month as it has for the past five years.

Hundreds of demonstrators turned up, many waving rainbow and American flags, and clashed outside of the headquarters. Police said that both sides rallied their supporters on social media to gather at the headquarters before the board meeting. Around 500 people showed up on Tuesday evening, reported KABC in Los Angeles.

Video posted to social media shows people throwing punches, jumping on each other and pulling one another by their hoodies as officers tried to intervene.

“While most of the protest was peaceful, a small group of individuals engaged in behavior deemed unsafe and a risk to public safety,” police said in a statement.

 

More of this is coming, and people will be hurt or killed. The trans folks you know are being targeted and they need our help. Reach out to them and let them know you are there.

 

And rein in your friends and family when they start talking about how "Pride month is anti-straight". Your sons, nephews, cousins and grandsons are being taught some heinously violent stuff. Disabuse them of it. 

 

BREAKING: Last Call For Orange Meltdown, Con't

Well, looks like this is the best birthday I've had in a while now.

 

The Justice Department took the legally and politically momentous step of lodging federal criminal charges against former President Donald J. Trump, multiple people familiar with the matter said on Thursday, following a lengthy investigation of his handling of classified documents that he took with him upon leaving office and then obstructing the government’s efforts to reclaim them.

The indictment, filed in Federal District Court in Miami, is the first time in American history a former president has faced federal charges. It puts the nation in an extraordinary position, given Mr. Trump’s status not only as a onetime chief executive but also as the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination to face President Biden, whose administration will now be seeking to convict his potential rival.

It was not immediately known what specific charges Mr. Trump is facing. One person briefed on the matter said there were seven counts.

Mr. Trump is expected to surrender himself to authorities in Miami on Tuesday, according to a person close to him and his own post on Truth Social.

The indictment, filed by the office of the special counsel Jack Smith, came about two months after local prosecutors in New York filed more than 30 felony charges against Mr. Trump in a case connected to a hush money payment to a porn star in advance of the 2016 election.

 

The game is now fully afoot. 

 

Merrick Garland and Jack Smith have come to play to win, it seems. 

Here we go.

A Supreme Surprise Across The Board

As it's June, we're now squarely in Supreme Court Sadness Season to see whether marginalized groups get to keep their rights, and who will have them stripped. But today at least, in two huge decisions, SCOTUS sided with the people.

 

First, a major ruling on Alabama's congressional redistricting and disenfranchisement of Black folk in the state: in a 5-4 decision, SCOTUS sided with a lower court ruling that Alabama's congressional districts violated the Voting Rights Act.

 

The court in a 5-4 vote ruled against Alabama, meaning the map of the seven congressional districts, which heavily favors Republicans, will now be redrawn. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, both conservatives, joined the court's three liberals in the majority.

In doing so, the court — which has a 6-3 conservative majority — turned away the state’s effort to make it harder to remedy concerns raised by civil rights advocates that the power of Black voters in states like Alabama is being diluted by dividing voters into districts where white voters dominate.

In Thursday’s ruling, Roberts, writing for the majority, said a lower court had correctly concluded that the congressional map violated the voting rights law.

He wrote that there are genuine fears that the Voting Rights Act “may impermissibly elevate race in the allocation of political power” and that the Alabama ruling “does not diminish or disregard those concerns."

The court instead “simply holds that a faithful application of our precedents and a fair reading of the record before us do not bear them out here,” Roberts added.

The two consolidated cases arose from litigation over the new congressional district map that was drawn by the Republican-controlled Alabama Legislature after the 2020 census. The challengers, including individual voters and the Alabama State Conference of the NAACP, said the map violated Section 2 of the 1965 voting rights law by discriminating against Black voters.

The new map created one district out of seven in the state in which Black voters would likely be able to elect a candidate of their choosing. The challengers say that the state, which has a population that is more than a quarter Black, should have two such districts and provided evidence that such a district could be drawn.

A lower court agreed in ruling last January, saying that under Supreme Court precedent, the plaintiffs had shown that Alabama’s Black population was both large enough and sufficiently compact for there to be a second majority-Black district. The court ordered a new map to be drawn, but the state’s Republican attorney general, Steve Marshall, turned to the Supreme Court, which put the litigation on hold and agreed to hear the case.

Four conservative justices, led by Justice Clarence Thomas, dissented in Thursday's ruling.

Thomas wrote that his preferred outcome “would not require the federal judiciary to decide the correct racial apportionment of Alabama’s congressional seats.”

He added that under the approach taken by the lower court, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act “is nothing more than a racial entitlement to roughly proportional control of elective offices .... wherever different racial groups consistently prefer different candidates.”

Last year, the Supreme Court was divided 5-4 in allowing the Republican-drawn map to be used in November’s election, with Roberts then joining the court’s three liberals in dissent.

Republicans won six of the seven seats in the election, while Democrats won the majority-Black district. With Black voters more likely to vote for Democrats, Democrats might have picked up an additional seat if a new map had been adopted.

The Alabama case was one of several in which the Supreme Court’s decisions may have contributed to Republicans winning their fragile majority in the House of Representatives.

 

It's a narrow win, but a win nonetheless, in a state that will continue to be dominated by the GOP for decades to come. As to when Alabama Republicans get around to redrawing said congressional districts, well, don't hold your breath on that one. I expect that as with Ohio, the state will drag its feet for years on this, and it'll all become moot in 2032 anyway (it may take that long).

 

No, don't expect a more fair map for 2024 elections in Alabama, Ohio, or any other red state. No matter what the Supreme Court says, Republicans know at this level, nobody can enforce a ruling like that anyway..but for today, it's a win. A ruling against this would have effectively ended the Voting Rights Act. Chief Justice Roberts has been relentlessly hostile towards to VRA but this time he held back.

Imagine how racist you have to be to get John Roberts to say "This is a clear violation of voting rights for Black folk."

The other major ruling involved the right for Medicaid patients to sue states in order to provide treatment under the law, and the decision was 7-2 in favor of the spouse of a woman who died after a nursing home refused to provide her care.

The Supreme Court upheld a key mechanism for beneficiaries of federal spending programs to sue if states violate their rights Thursday, the conclusion of a case that spawned protests, hearings and bottomless worry from activists and experts terrified that the Court would use it to hobble programs like Medicaid.

The case grew from a garden-variety Medicaid one, where a nursing home inhabitant’s family alleged that he was ill-treated. But the municipal-run nursing home, Health and Hospital Corporation of Marion County, Indiana (HHC), sensing an opportunity, challenged the mechanism to sue writ large.

Experts pounded the alarm: “This case is to Medicaid what Dobbs was to abortion,” Sara Rosenbaum, professor of health law and policy at George Washington University’s school of public health, told TPM.

And activists started devising plans of action to compel the HHC board to drop the case before the right-wing majority could get its hands on it. While those efforts were ultimately unsuccessful — the case went forward, with oral arguments in late 2022 — the coalition got the result they fought for by a large margin: Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was joined in her majority opinion by Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch and Chief Justice John Roberts. Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented.


Those most invested in the case were shocked by the outcome.

“I think I’m going to cry now,” Bryce Gustafson, an organizer with Indiana’s Citizens Action Coalition and one of the leaders of the push to get the case dropped, told TPM.

At first blush, the decision “looks like a grand slam for rights under Federal spending clause programs,” Tim Jost, professor of law, emeritus, at the Washington and Lee University School of Law, said.


“The Supreme Court upheld the rights of nursing home residents and other Medicaid recipients on all points, reaffirming decades of federal law,” he added. “Only Justice Thomas would have held that programs established under congress’s spending power are not enforceable by individuals.”

HHC, in a statement provided to TPM, insisted that it was just doing its “fiduciary duty” in bringing the case.

“HHC’s goal was to understand from the Supreme Court the status of the governing law on the availability of federal claims regarding its nursing home operations,” a spokesperson said. “With the Court’s definitive answer today that Medicaid-supported nursing home residents have both administrative and federal court remedies for alleged violations, HHC will continue to work to manage those operations safely and effectively and analyze the impact of the decision on those public resources.”

This pathway to sue, known as private rights of action under Section 1983, is critical for holding states accountable to make sure they provide the full services they’re required to within these spending programs. Without it, those who depend on federally-funded, state-administered programs — think Medicaid, SNAP (formerly known as food stamps) or WIC, which helps low-income pregnant women and mothers with young children buy food — are left with little recourse should states stop providing the benefits they’re required to give.

So a reprieve for now, until the next case that threatens rights, and sveral of those are still left undecided heading into the next few weeks. 

The GOP Circus Of The Damned, Con't

For now, GOP House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is holding on, but the revolt against him over the debt ceiling bill is increasing daily, and the MAGA hardliners have all but shut down House business until further notice.

 

Hard-right Republicans pressed their mutiny against Speaker Kevin McCarthy into a second day on Wednesday, keeping control of the House floor in a raw display of their power that raised questions about whether the speaker could continue to govern his slim and fractious majority.

Mr. McCarthy, who enraged ultraconservative Republicans by striking a compromise with President Biden to suspend the debt limit, has yet to face a bid to depose him, as some hard-right members have threatened. But the rebellion has left him, at least for now, as speaker in name only, deprived of a governing majority.

“House Leadership couldn’t Hold the Line,” Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida and a leader of the rebellion, tweeted on Wednesday. “Now we Hold the Floor.”

After being forced for the second day in a row to cancel votes as they haggled privately with members of the House Freedom Caucus to get them to relent, leaders told Republican lawmakers on Wednesday evening that they were scrapping votes for the remainder of the week. In a remarkable act of intraparty aggression, about a dozen rebels ground the chamber to a halt on Tuesday by siding with Democrats to defeat a procedural measure needed to allow legislation to move forward, and business cannot resume until they back down and vote with their own party.

It underscored the severe consequences Mr. McCarthy is facing for muscling through a debt ceiling agreement with the White House that contained only a fraction of the spending cuts Republicans had demanded. The episode has reignited divisions within Mr. McCarthy’s own leadership team, with the speaker suggesting his No. 2 was in part to blame for the dysfunction. And it was a blunt reminder of the challenge Mr. McCarthy will face in holding together his conference to pass crucial spending bills this year, which will be required to avert a government shutdown this fall and punishing across-the-board spending cuts in early 2025.

The paralysis that has gripped the House this week — an exceedingly rare instance of a faction of the majority holding its own party hostage — recalled Mr. McCarthy’s weeklong, 15-round slog to win his post, which required him to win over many of the same hard-right lawmakers instigating the current drama.

On Wednesday night, Mr. McCarthy conceded that there was “a little chaos going on,” though he insisted that he would get the party agenda back on track.

“We’ve been through this before; you know we’re in a small majority,” Mr. McCarthy told reporters earlier in the day. “I don’t take this job because it’s easy. We’ll work through this, and we’ll even be stronger.”

But he also appeared to blame the impasse at least in part on Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the majority leader, saying that he had caused a misunderstanding that paved the way for the spontaneous hijacking of the House floor on Tuesday.

“The majority leader runs the floor,” Mr. McCarthy said.

The temper tantrum from the right had little immediate impact other than to deprive Republicans of the chance to pass a messaging bill that was all but certain to die in the Senate. The legislation that the rebels blocked is aimed at guarding against government restrictions on gas stoves and other federal regulations.

But ultraconservative Republicans said much more was at stake, arguing that Mr. McCarthy had betrayed promises he made to them during his fight for the speakership and now had to be forced into honoring them.

“There was an agreement in January and it was violated in the debt ceiling bill,” said Representative Ken Buck, Republican of Colorado. He said the conversations with Mr. McCarthy on Wednesday were to discuss “how to restore some of that agreement.”

 

McCarthy remains in power because nobody else wants his job. Speaker of the House is a governing job, and Republicans don't want to govern, they want to destroy.  But, as I predicted several times since January, the moment McCarthy sealed a deal with Biden, the clock on his job started ticking.

It'll keep ticking right up until he's deposed. It may not be this month, but he's not going to make it until January 2025, and if he somehow does, he'll be a figurehead with no real power.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

The federal cases against Trump involving January 6th and documents in Mar-a-Lago both took major steps forward with grand jury testimony in both venues. Former Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows testified about both cases.

Mark Meadows, Donald Trump’s former chief of staff, has testified to a federal grand jury as part of special counsel Jack Smith’s ongoing investigation into the former president, according to one source familiar with the matter.

Meadows was asked about the former president’s handling of classified documents as well as efforts to overturn the 2020 election, another source familiar with the matter said.

George Terwilliger, a lawyer representing Meadows, said in a statement that “Without commenting on whether or not Mr. Meadows has testified before the grand jury or in any other proceeding, Mr. Meadows has maintained a commitment to tell the truth where he has a legal obligation to do so.”

A spokesperson for the special counsel’s office declined to comment.

The New York Times first reported on Meadow’s appearance before the grand jury.

Meadows is viewed as a critical witness to Smith’s investigation. He was ordered to testify before the grand jury and to provide documents after a judge rejected Trump’s claims of executive privilege.

His testimony could provide investigators key insight into the former president’s actions and mental state following the election he lost to Joe Biden as well as into Trump’s actions after he left office in January 2021.

CNN previously reported that Meadows, under subpoena, turned over some materials to the Justice Department as part of their investigation.

 

And in Florida, the grand jury in the documents case has been very busy this week.

Federal prosecutors have subpoenaed multiple witnesses to testify before a previously unknown grand jury in Florida in the criminal investigation into Donald Trump’s handling of national security materials and obstruction of justice, according to people familiar with the matter.

The new grand jury activity at the US district court in Miami marks the latest twist in the investigation that for months has involved a grand jury that had been taking evidence in the case in Washington but has been silent since the start of last month.

Trump aide Taylor Budowich is scheduled to testify before the Florida grand jury on Wednesday, one of the people said, and questioning is expected to be led by Jay Bratt, the justice department’s counterintelligence chief detailed to the special counsel Jack Smith, who is leading the investigation.

The previously unreported involvement of Bratt could suggest the questioning may focus on potential Espionage Act violations, particularly whether Trump showed off national security documents to people at his Mar-a-Lago resort – a recent focus of the investigation.

Bratt, who was seen arriving in Miami on Tuesday by the Guardian, has previously appeared for grand jury proceedings in the espionage side of the investigation, as opposed to the obstruction side, which has typically been led by Smith’s other prosecutors or national security trial attorneys.

A justice department spokesperson declined to comment.

But the underlying reasons as to why prosecutors in the special counsel’s office impaneled the new grand jury in Florida, and whether it is now the only grand jury active in the case after the Washington grand jury has sat dormant for weeks, remains an open question.

 

We know now that the Washington grand jury heard from Mark Meadows today.

 

We're reaching the end game here, folks.

 

Whether or not Trump gets federal charges, well, I have to believe he will.

 

[UPDATE] Maybe this is moving much faster than we thought.

The Department of Justice is preparing to ask a Washington, DC grand jury to indict former president Donald Trump for violating the Espionage Act and for obstruction of justice as soon as Thursday, adding further weight to the legal baggage facing Mr Trump as he campaigns for his party’s nomination in next year’s presidential election.

The Independent has learned that prosecutors are ready to ask grand jurors to approve an indictment against Mr Trump for violating a portion of the US criminal code known as Section 793, which prohibits “gathering, transmitting or losing” any “information respecting the national defence”.

The use of Section 793, which does not make reference to classified information, is understood to be a strategic decision by prosecutors that has been made to short-circuit Mr Trump’s ability to claim that he used his authority as president to declassify documents he removed from the White House and kept at his Palm Beach, Florida property long after his term expired on 20 January 2021.

That section of US criminal law is written in a way that could encompass Mr Trump’s conduct even if he was authorised to possess the information as president because it states that anyone who “lawfully having possession of, access to, control over, or being entrusted with any document ...relating to the national defence,” and “willfully communicates, delivers, transmits or causes to be communicated, delivered, or transmitted or attempts to communicate, deliver, transmit or cause to be communicated, delivered or transmitted the same to any person not entitled to receive it, or willfully retains the same and fails to deliver it on demand to the officer or employee of the United States entitled to receive it” can be punished by as many as 10 years in prison.

It is understood that prosecutors intend to ask grand jurors to vote on the indictment on Thursday, but that vote could be delayed as much as a week until the next meeting of the grand jury to allow for a complete presentation of evidence, or to allow investigators to gather more evidence for presentation if necessary.

 

Tomorrow's my birthday. The universe doesn't love me this much for this to happen then, but we'll see.

 

 

The Broken Licht Theory

CNN head Chris Licht is out after his multple failures of the Donald Trump and Nikki Haley "town halls" and the devastating takedown of Licht in The Atlantic over the weekend.

 

Chris Licht, the former television producer who oversaw a brief and chaotic run as the chairman of CNN, is out at the network.

Mr. Licht’s 13-month run at CNN was marked by one controversy after another, culminating in his exit earlier this week. He got off to a bumpy start even before he had officially started when he oversaw the shuttering of the costly CNN+ streaming service at the request of its network’s new owners, who were skeptical about a stand-alone digital product. The cuts resulted in scores of layoffs.

David Zaslav, the chief executive of CNN’s parent, Warner Bros. Discovery, informed staff on Wednesday morning that he had met with Mr. Licht and that he was leaving, effective immediately.

“For a number of reasons things didn’t work out, and that’s unfortunate,” Mr. Zaslav said, according to a recording of his remarks. “It’s really unfortunate, and ultimately that’s on me. And I take full responsibility for that.”

“This job was never going to be easy, especially at a time of great disruption and transformation,” he continued. “Chris poured his heart and soul into this job. Like all of you, he was in the line of fire and he’s taken a lot of hits. We appreciate his efforts, his passion, his love for journalism, and his love for this business.”

Mr. Zaslav said that an interim group of leaders — the CNN veterans Amy Entelis, Virginia Moseley and Eric Sherling, as well as the newly appointed chief operating officer, David Leavy — would take over before a permanent leader was installed. He said the process could take several months.

Mr. Licht’s departure represents a dramatic fall not long after he departed as an executive producer of Stephen Colbert’s top-rated late night show and vowed to bring a middle-of-the-road balance to CNN’s journalism. When Mr. Licht took the job, he told friends it was a “calling.”

The job would prove much more difficult. Ratings plummeted during Mr. Licht’s management and a series of programming miscues — including an ill-fated morning show co-anchored by Don Lemon, as well as organizing a town hall featuring former President Donald J. Trump that was subject to withering criticism — did little to shore up support with his colleagues.

Things deteriorated last week when The Atlantic published a 15,000-word profile extensively documenting Mr. Licht’s stormy tenure, including criticism of the network’s pandemic coverage that rankled the network’s rank-and-file.

Further worsening matters was CNN’s financial performance. The network generated $750 million in profit last year, including one-time losses from the CNN+ streaming service, down from $1.25 billion the year before.

 

Now, Zazlav has been running around WB Discovery with a chainsaw anyway, axing reams of content from HBO, Cinemax, Cartoon Network and more, and now his blade has fallen on Licht's neck at CNN. I had honestly forgotten about Licht first move last year, the ill-fated CNN+ streaming disaster that lost the network millions.

 

Turns out the network has now lost over a billion dollars, and that was the end of Licht.

 

The White Guy Upward Failure Rule means Licht will probably end up Vice President in 2024, just saying.

Last Call For The GOP Circus Of The Damned, Con't

GOP House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is losing control of his caucus after the debt ceiling deal with Hakeem Jeffries and President Biden, and the clock is ticking on how long he keeps his ringmaster hat and jacket.

 

House conservatives on Tuesday blew up an effort by GOP leadership to advance several bills in a dramatic confrontation on the House floor, the result of a revolt against the debt limit deal cut by Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and President Biden just days before.

Eleven Republicans — most of whom are members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus — joined Democrats in voting against a rule to advance four bills related to gas stoves and regulatory reform, enough opposition to tank the rule and block the legislation from advancing to the floor.

Just before the vote closed, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) changed his vote to oppose the rule as well, a move that allows him to bring up the rule for another vote at a later time. The final vote was 206-220.

The revolt made for a dramatic scene on the House floor, where Scalise huddled with more than a dozen conservatives in the back of the chamber in a tense effort to flip votes and allow the bills to advance to the floor.

The normally-routine rule vote — which was scheduled to be only five minutes — went on for more than 50 minutes.

The revolt was a reality check for McCarthy, who has been taking a victory lap after Congress passed and Biden signed a bill to suspend the debt limit that was the product of negotiations between House Republicans and the White House.

“We’re frustrated at the way this place is operating,” Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) — one of the conservative who voted against the rule — told reporters as the vote was still happening.

“We took a stand in January to end the era of the imperial Speakership, and we’re concerned that the fundamental commitments that allowed Kevin McCarthy to assume the Speakership have been violated as a consequence of the debt limit deal. And, you know, the answer for us is to reassert House conservatives as the appropriate coalition partner for our leadership instead of them making common cause with Democrats,” he added.

 

If the House GOP can no longer pass simple, performative bills like FREEDOMS FOR GAS STOVES ACT '23 or whatever, the measure of McCarthy's reign gets shortened considerably. And yes, for once Matt Gaetz is correct: McCarthy absolutely made common cause with Hakeem Jeffries and the House Democrats on the debt ceiling measure, despite all the House Republicans who wanted to blow up the economy. 

If McCarthy can't handle even basic nonsense legislation, the next time real stuff comes up, he's toast.

Putin's Pipe-Lying Problem, Con't

A lot of ink has been spilled over the Nord Stream pipelines, but the fact remains that the Nord Stream pipelines both blew up, and somebody is responsible for it. Russia blames the US, the US blames Russia, but the actual team that did it could very well be Ukrainian, at least, that's what the Washington Post is reporting today.

 

Three months before saboteurs bombed the Nord Stream natural gas pipeline, the Biden administration learned from a close ally that the Ukrainian military had planned a covert attack on the undersea network, using a small team of divers who reported directly to the commander in chief of the Ukrainian armed forces.

Details about the plan, which have not been previously reported, were collected by a European intelligence service and shared with the CIA in June 2022. They provide some of the most specific evidence to date linking the government of Ukraine to the eventual attack in the Baltic Sea, which U.S. and Western officials have called a brazen and dangerous act of sabotage on Europe’s energy infrastructure.

The European intelligence reporting was shared on the chat platform Discord, allegedly by Air National Guard member Jack Teixeira. The Washington Post obtained a copy from one of Teixeira’s online friends.

The intelligence report was based on information obtained from an individual in Ukraine. The source’s information could not immediately be corroborated, but the CIA shared the report with Germany and other European countries last June, according to multiple officials familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence operations and diplomatic discussions.

 

Which brings us back to the Discord leaks on Ukraine's military intelligence to begin with. The folks profiting the most from this scenario are of course Vladimir Putin and his merry band of oligarchs. How white-hot intel like this ended up in the hands of an Air Force reservist, well, as I've said since Snowden, the Russians have had the crown jewels of US intelligence for nearly a decade now. 

And pointing the finger at Ukraine for the pipeline is exactly the kind of thing Russia wants in order to justify actions like this.

A torrent of water burst through a massive dam on the Dnipro River that separates Russian and Ukrainian forces in southern Ukraine on Tuesday, flooding a swathe of the war zone, forcing villagers to flee and prompting finger-pointing from both sides.

Ukraine said Russia had committed a deliberate war crime in blowing up the Soviet-era Nova Kakhovka dam. The Kremlin blamed Ukraine, saying it was trying to distract from the launch of a major counteroffensive Moscow says is faltering.

Some Russian-installed officials said the dam had collapsed on its own.

Neither side offered immediate public evidence of who was to blame. The Geneva Conventions explicitly ban targeting dams in war because of the danger to civilians.

Hundreds of people were evacuated from settlements along the southern stretch of Ukraine's Dnipro river as flood waters submerged streets, town squares and homes.

It was not immediately clear if anyone had been killed. The White House said it could not say conclusively what caused the destruction of the dam, but spokesman John Kirby said it had probably caused "many deaths".

Lidia Zubova, 67, waiting for a train out of the city of Kherson in Ukrainian government-controlled territory after abandoning her inundated village of Antonivka, told Reuters: "Our local school and stadium downtown were flooded... The road was completely flooded, our bus got stuck."

 

The suffering in Crimea because of the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam is already massive, with thousands fleeing the area, and sustainability of water supplies in the region now questionable for decades. It's a straight up violation of the Geneva Conventions, but it happens to be payback for the Nord Stream, and everyone knows it.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine is becoming more and more of a nightmare each day, it seems. And Putin is still the one laughing about it.

Ron's Gone Wrong, Con't

Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis is in hot water with both Texas and California for his immigration "relocation" stunts, as officials in both states are considering his practice of taking loads of undocumented immigrants and dumping them in other states as human trafficking.

 

A Texas sheriff’s department has recommended that the district attorney in Bexar County bring criminal charges over the first iteration of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ so-called migrant relocation program. Those flights last September sent 49 asylum seekers, most of them Venezuelans, from San Antonio to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts.

According to a statement provided to the Miami Herald, the Bexar County sheriff completed its criminal investigation into the on-the-ground operation that allegedly lured migrants onto the flights with false promises of jobs and opportunities on the other end.

“The case filed includes both felony and misdemeanor charges of Unlawful Restraint,” according to the statement. “At this time, the case is being reviewed by the DA’s office. Once an update is available, it will be provided to the public.”

Now it’s up to prosecutors in Bexar County, which includes San Antonio, to decide whether to follow the sheriff’s recommendation. The district attorney did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Last fall, Bexar County Sheriff Javier Salazar issued special certifications to all of the migrants flown to Martha’s Vineyard declaring them to be official victims of a crime and paving the way for them to stay in the United States under a special visa for those helpful to law enforcement. Unlawful restraint is a misdemeanor unless the victim is younger than 17 — as was the case for five of the migrants.

Handing the case over to prosecutors is a critical juncture in a criminal probe that could snare some of DeSantis’ top aides. The migrant relocation program, using Florida tax dollars, was overseen by DeSantis’ chief of staff, James Uthmeier, and public safety czar Larry Keefe.

The sheriff announced its charging recommendation in a statement to the Herald Monday as news broke of several dozen migrants transported from El Paso to Sacramento, California, using a playbook similar to the one DeSantis used to send asylum seekers to Massachusetts last year.

 

Meanwhile, with DeSantis sending a second planeload of undocumented immigrants to Sacramento, Gov. Gavin Newsom has a few choice words for DeSantis himself.

Gov. Gavin Newsom took his feud with Gov. Ron DeSantis to new heights on Monday, seemingly threatening him with kidnapping charges after California officials say South American migrants were sent to Sacramento by the state of Florida as a political stunt.

Newsom, a Democrat, cited state kidnapping laws in a tweet to the Florida governor and Republican presidential hopeful, whom he called a “small, pathetic man.”

“This isn’t Martha’s Vineyard. Kidnapping charges?” Newsom said in the tweet, referencing DeSantis’ action last year to send a group of Venezuelan migrants to the wealthy liberal vacation spot in Massachusetts.


Sixteen migrants from Venezuela and Colombia were transported from Texas to New Mexico and flown on a chartered jet to Sacramento, where they were dropped off Friday at a church, Newsom said.

On Monday, a plane carrying 20 migrants arrived in Sacramento. Both groups were flown by the same contractor and were carrying documents indicating that their transportation involved the state of Florida, according to officials with the California Department of Justice.

Newsom said that his administration is working with the agency to “investigate the circumstances around” who paid for the plane trips, whether migrants were misled and whether laws were violated, including kidnapping.

It is unclear what legal action the state plans to take. After Newsom tweeted the threat of kidnapping charges, his spokesperson deferred questions to Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta’s office. Bonta said over the weekend that he was “evaluating potential criminal or civil action” but did not release additional details Monday.

 

At some point, DeSantis has to answer for this.

 

Who will actually make him do that, well...

Last Call For Pool Fools

Trump's pool at Mar-a-Lago apparently flooded his surveillance system server room last year, so of course all the surveillance footage could have been lost of who may have been in the room with his stolen documents...

 

An employee at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence drained the resort’s swimming pool last October and ended up flooding a room where computer servers containing surveillance video logs were kept, sources familiar with the matter told CNN.

While it’s unclear if the room was intentionally flooded or if it happened by mistake, the incident occurred amid a series of events that federal prosecutors found suspicious.

At least one witness has been asked by prosecutors about the flooded server room as part of the federal investigation into Trump’s handling of classified documents, according to one of the sources.

The incident, which has not been previously reported, came roughly two months after the FBI retrieved hundreds of classified documents from the Florida residence and as prosecutors obtained surveillance footage to track how White House records were moved around the resort. Prosecutors have been examining any effort to obstruct the Justice Department’s investigation after Trump received a subpoena in May 2022 for classified documents.

Prosecutors have heard testimony that the IT equipment in the room was not damaged in the flood, according to one source.

Yet the flooded room as well as conversations and actions by Trump’s employees while the criminal investigation bore down on the club has caught the attention of prosecutors. The circumstances may factor into a possible obstruction conspiracy case, multiple sources tell CNN, as investigators try to determine whether the events of last year around Mar-a-Lago indicate that Trump or a small group of people working for him, took steps to try to interfere with the Justice Department’s evidence-gathering.

 

If you "accidentally" flood your servers, in a Florida coastal basement, because that's where your servers with surveillance footage would naturally be, is it obstruction of justice?

 

We're about to find out.

Ron's Gone Wrong, Con't

As critics made it painfully clear, Florida's law banning gender-affirming care for minors signed into law last month by GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis, also makes it effectively impossible to get for adults, and the state's trans community is finding out the hard way that this was the intent all along.

 

Eli and Lucas, trans men who are a couple, followed the discussions in the Legislature, where Democrats warned that trans children would be more prone to suicide under a ban on gender-affirming care for minors and Republicans responded with misplaced tales of mutilated kids. Eli said he and his partner felt “blindsided” when they discovered the bill contained language that would also disrupt their lives.

“There was no communication. … Nobody was really talking about it in our circles,” said Eli, 29.

Like many transgender adults in Florida, he and Lucas are now facing tough choices, including whether to uproot their lives so that they can continue to access gender-confirming care. Clinics are also trying to figure out how to operate under regulations that have made Florida a test case for restrictions on adults.

Lucas, 26, lost his access to treatment when the Orlando clinic that prescribed him hormone replacement therapy stopped providing gender-affirming care altogether. The couple also worries about staying in a state that this year enacted several other bills targeting the LGBTQ+ community.

“My entire life is here. All my friends, my family. I just got a promotion at my job, which I’m probably not to be able to keep,” Lucas, who works in a financial aid office at a college, said. “I’m losing everything except Eli and my pets moving out of here. So this was not a decision that I took lightly at all.”

The Associated Press is not using Eli’s and Lucas’ last names because they fear reprisal. While their friends and families know they are trans, most people who meet them do not.

The new law that bans gender-affirming care for minors also mandates that adult patients seeking trans health care sign an informed consent form. It also requires a physician to oversee any health care related to transitioning, and for people to see that doctor in person. Those rules have proven particularly onerous because many people received care from nurse practitioners and used telehealth. The law also made it a crime to violate the new requirements.

Another new law that allows doctors and pharmacists to refuse to treat transgender people further limits their options.

“For trans adults, it’s devastating,” said Kate Steinle, chief clinical officer at FOLX Health, which provides gender-affirming care to trans adults through telemedicine. Her company decided to open in-person clinics and hire more physicians licensed in Florida in order to continue to provide care to patients who have already enrolled, even though that represents a major change to the company’s business model.

Eli has been seeing a physician for years and therefore still has access to care. But SPEKTRUM Health Inc., the Orlando clinic that prescribed Lucas hormone replacement therapy, has stopped providing gender-affirming care.

“There are a lot of people looking for care that we’re no longer legally able to provide,” said Lana Dunn, SPEKTRUM Health’s chief operating officer.

Florida has the second-largest population of transgender adults in the U.S., at an estimated 94,900 people, according to the Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law. It used state-level, population-based surveys to determine its estimates. Not all transgender people seek medical interventions.

At least 19 states have now enacted laws restricting or banning gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors. But restrictions on adults haven’t been part of the conversation in most places. Missouri’s attorney general tried to impose a rule in that state, but it was pulled back.

Florida is “the proving ground of what they can get away with,” Dunn said.

 

That last sentence there, marking trans folks for increasingly brutal and endless state-sponsored cruelty, is, as they say, the point. More is coming. Republicans will block any federal attempt to stop red states from eliminating trans folks, but the government-sponsored destruction of an entire class of people is the key to a fascist state. Once you can take the rights of a group, then everyone else's rights become secondary to the whims of state decreeing the next group slated for demolition, until nobody is left.

Regardless of DeSantis's ongoing failure as a GOP presidential primary candidate, his policies are going national across dozens of states, hurting hundreds of thousands of Americans.

How Biden Was Ridin'

Greg Sargent points out that President Joe Biden beat the GOP on the debt ceiling showdown by outmaneuvering them, peeling off those Republicans who weren't completely committed to burning down the country and using them to cut a deal. 

Now that Congress has passed the debt limit deal, explanations for President Biden’s success in negotiating the outcome are abounding. Among them: Biden drew on his long experience in Washington to achieve bipartisan compromise; he avoided claiming a win so Republicans could support it; he didn’t get distracted by the media’s second-guessing.




Here’s another way to understand this unexpected outcome: Biden is operating from a largely unappreciated theory of MAGA, and in some ways, it’s working.


Passage of the deal, which averts default and economic calamity, was decisively bipartisan. The Senate approved it Thursday night with 17 Republicans backing it, after it passed the House with support from more than two-thirds of House Republicans.

This happened even though the deal’s spending cuts are not close to what Republicans sought. Yes, the outcome legitimizes the debt limit as a tool of extortion and imposes cruel new work requirements on many food stamp recipients. But Republicans didn’t use this showdown to crash or cripple the economy, as some observers (including me) worried they might.

Biden’s theory of MAGA helps explain this outcome. Biden ran in 2020 on the idea that the country faced an existential threat from the far right, highlighting white supremacy, political violence and President Donald Trump’s unprecedented attacks on democracy. This year’s reelection launch highlighted the assault on the Capitol and cast “MAGA extremists” as a threat to American “freedom.”

However, in promising to restore “the soul of the nation” in the face of this threat, Biden has continually distinguished between MAGA Republicans and more conventional ones. This approach has been criticized by those of us who see much of the GOP as extreme and dangerous — after all, many elected Republicans helped whitewash Trump’s insurrection — and think Biden’s characterization of non-MAGA Republicans plays down that broader threat.

But Biden’s reading served him well in the debt limit standoff. Contrary to much criticism, Bidenworld believes that refusing to negotiate at the outset was key: It forced Republicans to offer their own budget, which created an opening to attack the savage spending cuts in it.

Notably, Biden and other Democrats relentlessly characterized those cuts as destructive and dangerous in the MAGA vein. Bidenworld did believe that some MAGA Republicans were willing to default and force global economic cataclysm to harm the president’s reelection, a senior Biden adviser tells me, but also that many non-MAGA Republicans ultimately could be induced not to go that far.

That seems to be what happened. As political scientist Jonathan Bernstein points out, the outcome falsified the prediction that the GOP as a party would use that leverage to inflict maximum chaos. Meanwhile, the cuts themselves won’t be nearly as damaging to the economy as the ones in the 2011 standoff, as the New York Times’s Paul Krugman explains.

This illuminates Bidenworld’s broader theory of the MAGA GOP: The way to defeat the MAGA threat to the country is to marginalize it within the GOP coalition — that is, to contain it.

“He has never hesitated to call out the extreme MAGA wing of the Republican Party,” Kate Bedingfield, a senior adviser to the 2020 Biden campaign and to the White House through February, told me. “But he gives Republican voters and legislators who reject that wing of the party a place to go.”

 

It's that last part, giving Republicans a place to go besides MAGA, that's the key to all this. It's something that I don't believe in because any Republican remains an existential threat to folks like me, but giving them an alternative that allows them to hurt MAGA is the job I voted for Biden to take.

He's doing a bang-up job, and if it splits the GOP, I'm all for it.

Last Call For Press The Meat, Con't

Chuck Todd is leaving NBC panel show staple Meet The Press later this year, with NBC News White House correspondent Karen Welker replacing him.

 

Chuck Todd said on Sunday that he’ll be leaving “Meet the Press” after a tumultuous near-decade of moderating the NBC political panel show, to be replaced in the coming months by Kristen Welker.

Todd, 51, told viewers that “I’ve watched too many friends and family let work consume them before it was too late” and that he’d promised his family he wouldn’t do that.

Todd has often been an online punching bag for critics, including Donald Trump, during a polarized time, and there were rumors that his time at the show would be short when its executive producer was reassigned at the end of last summer, but NBC gave no indication this was anything other than Todd’s decision. It’s unclear when Todd’s last show will be, but he told viewers that this would be his final summer.

“I leave feeling concerned about this moment in history but reassured by the standards we’ve set here,” Todd said. “We didn’t tolerate propagandists, and this network and program never will.”

Welker, a former chief White House correspondent, has been at NBC News in Washington since 2011 and has been Todd’s chief fill-in for the past three years. She drew praise for moderating the final presidential debate between Trump, a Republican, and Joe Biden, a Democrat, in 2020.


Her “sharp questioning of lawmakers is a masterclass in political interviews,” said Rebecca Blumenstein, NBC News president of editorial, in a memo announcing Welker’s elevation on Sunday.

Now Welker, 46, will be thrust into what promises to be another contentious presidential election cycle.

 

Welker will be the first Black host of MTP, and has filled in for Todd a number of times already. She also moderated the second 2020 presidential debate between Biden and Trump and managed to keep a leash on The Donald...to an extent that anyone can.

We'll see how she fares.